In the junior playroom Jean Murray had been taking the opportunity to revive the animosity against the new girl.

‘Can’t you see that she’s laughing at us all?’ she exclaimed to a circle of humble listeners. ‘It’s all very well to pretend to be such a baby; that kind of thing may go down with the elder ones, but it won’t do here. Anybody can see that she’s only putting it all on, to be aggravating.’

‘She told a story the very day she arrived,’ chimed in Angela from behind. ‘A girl who could do that would do anything.’

‘Can’t you leave the child alone?’ suggested Charlotte Bigley, who happened to be listening. ‘She seems such a harmless infant to me. I don’t believe she even knows she is supposed to be in disgrace.’

It required a good deal of courage to stand up alone against all the girls in the junior playroom, and Charlotte flushed a little when they all laughed at her.

‘That’s where her artfulness comes in,’ declared Jean. She thought she heard her rival’s voice on the other side of the curtain, and jealousy made her more bitter than before. ‘If you ask me, I believe she only pretends not to notice any of us, so as to pick up everything she can; and then she goes and sneaks it all to the elder ones.’

‘Oh, Jean!’ remonstrated Charlotte.

Jean looked a tiny bit ashamed of herself. It was not nearly so easy to say unkind things about the new girl as it had been a week ago. All the same, her unhappiness at the continued coldness of Margaret Hulme was quite genuine, and it hurt her sorely to think that the head girl was now smiling on the interloper as she used to smile upon her.

‘Well, it’s true!’ she vowed. ‘I vote we don’t leave her alone, or give her the chance of mocking at us, any more. She wants to be taught that she’s the youngest girl in the school, and that it isn’t anything to be cocky about. Anybody who likes can make up to her, as the big girls do; but I am going to see that she keeps in her place.’

‘What a fuss to make about an innocent brat like that,’ remarked Charlotte, smiling scornfully. ‘It’s jealousy, because Margaret is kind to her: that’s all it is!’

That was decidedly what it was, but it did not soothe Jean’s temper to be told so in this blunt manner; and by the time her rival came in from the seniors’ room, the enemy had been worked up into a fine state of resentment against her. Unconscious as ever that there was anything unusual in the atmosphere of the junior playroom, Barbara slipped through the girls who were standing about, and reached her footstool and her letter almost before they noticed that she had returned. There seemed to be some wrangling going on between Jean Murray and Charlotte; but Jean Murray was always wrangling with some one about something, and Babs paid no more attention to it than to the sudden hush that followed as she dropped down in her old position on the floor. It was a good thing, she thought, that nobody talked just then, because there was so little time left in which to finish her letter. She took up the pages she had written and glanced over them.

‘Thank you awfuly much for your advice,’ she had scrawled in her large childish hand. ‘I am cheering up lots and now that I don’t take any notice of the girls and their awfull siliness it is quite nice being here but not nearly so nice as being at home with you and father all of which is now burried for ever alass in my past. I don’t hate girls like I did at first. At first they were always bothering and asking quesstions and being inquissitive but now they leave me alone and never talk except when they want the salt or the butter or haven’t heard the number of the psarm at prayers or can’t do their algibra I have lots of algibra to do because girls aren’t good at algibra I don’t think so I always do their algibra for them. Girls are no fun like boys but as long as they don’t say horible things to me like they did at first I think I shall be able to bear them all right but its rather dull excep when we play hockey I’m getting on at hockey Hurly-Burly says and she says I shall play in matches some day and she’s a brick and I like her. We haven’t had any gym yet because the gymnasiam is being painted but we’re going to begin to-morrow and I’m longing to begin they can’t laugh at my short skirts at gym because everybody’s skirt is short at gym and its red and very becomming Ruth says Ruth is Ruth Oliver and she’s a big girl and she hooks up my frocks and kisses me she kisses me rather a lot but it’s Ruth Oliver so I can put up with it. School is very nice when it’s games or algibra or latin but it’s horrid when its dictation or geography or coppies Finny says I must try so I am trying but I wish I wasn’t such an ignorrant girl I heard Jean Murray say yesterday I was the most ignorrant girl that ever came inside this house but praps that was because I had seventeen speling faults.’

She sighed as she dipped her pen in the ink again. That was all she had said, after writing nearly all the afternoon and evening. And she had so much more to say, and there was so little time left before prayers!

‘I have just seen the doctor who is a Beast and he isn’t a Beast,’ she had written laboriously on a fresh page, when Jean Murray stooped over her and shook her vigorously by the arm.‘Oh, dear!’ sighed Babs, feeling in her pocket for the handkerchief that so rarely seemed to be in it. ‘There’s another blot, and I’m in such a hurry!’

‘It’s no use losing your temper about it,’ said Jean. ‘You’ve got to get up from the floor and fetch a desk, if you want to write letters.’

Barbara looked up in mild surprise. ‘But I’m not losing my temper! Are you sure you don’t mean you when you say me?’ she asked with a spice of mischief in her tone.

‘There!’ said Jean, turning triumphantly to the attendant Angela. ‘Didn’t I say she was only laughing at us? Now, look here,’ she continued, turning again to Babs, ‘you’ve got to remember that you’re the youngest in the school––’

‘Oh, don’t!’ interrupted Babs, putting up her hands to her ears. ‘You’ll begin about the head girl’s boots next.’

It was the most luckless thing she could have said, for it convinced Jean more than ever that the new girl was bent on making game of her most serious feelings.

‘I shall say anything I choose,’ she retorted hotly. ‘Get off the floor at once, will you? We don’t want ink spilt all over the place; this isn’t a nursery.’

‘Who’s spilling ink all over the place?’ asked Barbara, without moving. All the mischief that was in her rose uppermost when any one spoke to her like that.‘You are, of course,’ returned Jean, shaking her again. ‘You’re so badly brought up that you don’t know how to behave in a civilised house. You’re nothing but a young savage; I heard Margaret Hulme say so, directly you arrived–there! It’s easy to see you’ve never had any one to look after you.’

The mischievous look died out of the child’s face, and she gathered up her papers and scrambled slowly to her feet. The boys would have known that such lamblike behaviour was only the prelude to one of the Babe’s ‘furies’; but Jean thought she had succeeded at last in subduing her, and she became exultant.

‘It’s time that some one civilised you,’ she remarked scornfully. ‘I’m glad I’ve been brought up properly, and not neglected like you.’

Barbara flashed round upon her suddenly. ‘What’s the matter with my bringing-up?’ she demanded in a breathless voice. ‘My father brought me up, and no one in the whole world could have brought me up better than he has.’

‘That accounts for it,’ scoffed Jean. ‘Fathers can’t bring anybody up, especially girls. I’ve heard mother say so, lots of times.’

Barbara’s eyes were glittering brightly. ‘My father can,’ she answered swiftly. ‘My father isn’t like other people’s fathers. You shouldn’t judge my father by your father. I don’t expect your father to be clever because mine is, do I?’

The implied insult was quite accidental on her part, in spite of the anger that was growing in her; but Jean could not be expected to know that.

‘How dare you say that my father isn’t clever?’ she cried indignantly. ‘My father is a professor at Edinburgh, so there!’

‘My father writes books,’ answered Babs, proudly. ‘It’s much more wonderful to write books than to be a professor, because everybody all over the world hears of you if you write books.’

‘That depends on whether they’re good books,’ argued Jean, warmly. ‘You have to be clever if you want to be a professor, but any stupid person can write a stupid book, and nobody ever hears of that kind of book at all.’

‘Everybody has heard of my father’s book, though, so that shows how little you know about it,’ replied Barbara. ‘The people in America liked his book so much that they asked him to go all the way to America to lecture about it. The people in America never asked your father––’

‘Is your father called Everard Berkeley?’ asked Jean, suddenly. She had not listened to grown-up conversations in the Christmas holidays for nothing, and she thought she saw her way at last to crushing the irrepressible new girl, once and for all.

Babs nodded. She was too proud to say anything. What other girl in the room had a father who was so celebrated that people knew him by his Christian name, instead of calling him just Mr. Somebody? She had only a short time in which to enjoy her triumph, however, for Jean Murray turned quickly on her heel, and walked off with a swaggering step.

‘Then my father says that your father is a failure over here,’ she answered, tossing her head contemptuously. ‘Nobody will read his old book in England; so he was obliged to go to America.’

The other girls were beginning to notice the dispute, and they came crowding round to hear what it was all about. Most of them were in time to see Jean Murray walk off with her head in the air, just as the little new girl clenched her fists and crouched down as if to make a spring. Then the storm broke, and the Babe’s fury was let loose among the fifty-five occupants of the junior playroom.

It was an easy matter, in that spring forward, to send some half dozen or so spinning out of her way, but Barbara did not stop to see what happened to them. All she wanted to do was to reach the arch offender of them all, the one who had dared to slight her father, and to hold him up to the ridicule of fifty-five girls.

Nobody quite knew what did happen on this unexampled occasion in the annals of Wootton Beeches; and certainly nobody stirred a finger to put a stop to it. All that the girls in the senior playroom could tell about it afterwards was that a sudden scuffle and several screams broke the hush and hum of voices on the other side of the curtain; and then Angela Wilkins dashed through the archway with a terrified look on her face, and seized Margaret by the arm.

‘Oh, come! do come!’ she sobbed out in her fright. ‘Barbara Berkeley has got Jean Murray down on the floor, and she’s killing her!’